You know how hard I have tried to get the autograph copy of "My Captain,"1 for our Iowa Collection. But the fates—or Walt Whitman—are ever against me.
But will you send it to me now, for a remittance of $5.00?
Very sincerely yours, Charles Aldrich.One of our drawers—16 x 18 inches—is now devoted to memorials of yourself, but I am most anxious to secure a holograph copy of "My Captain," while you can still write it & I can fitly arrange it in my collection, which, you are aware, is always open to the free inspection of the great Democracy. It should be written on but one side of the paper, dated & signed.2
Correspondent:
Charles Aldrich
(1828–1908) was an ornithologist, a member of the Iowa House of
Representatives, an infantry captain in the Civil War, and founder of the Iowa
Historical Department. He was also an avid autograph collector, especially of
Whitman's. He was so eager that the poet termed him "a very hungry man . . .
never satisfied—is always crying for more and more" (Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Tuesday, August 20, 1889). Aldrich visited Whitman at his Camden home
numerous times, and he served as a conduit between the poet and William Michael
Rossetti in England, who edited the first British edition of Whitman's work. For
more information, see Ed Folsom, "The Mystical Ornithologist and the Iowa
Tufthunter: Two Unpublished Whitman Letters and Some Identifications," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 1 (1983),
18–29.